


lifting a weight

by spoke



Category: Breath of Fire III
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 09:49:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12033402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: Garr thinks about his life and motivations up to the point of finding Ryu in the mines.





	lifting a weight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ysavvryl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ysavvryl/gifts).



> Many thanks to my beta, Morbane. The story is better for her input, and any remaining mistakes are my own.

Dark clouds gathering in the west convince Garr that he needs to stop walking and make camp. A few more monsters are dispatched before he reaches a suitable clearing among the dark trees of the mountain, but that’s all to the good. Any measure of good he can do is a balm to the soul. 

It has been years of wandering, asking questions first of the Princess, then of villagers and farmers, then even of sniveling little weasels that had worked for Balio and Sunder. And never an answer of where Ryu came from, knowing only, eventually, that it was near McNeil village. He suspects, with some annoyance each time he remembers, that Nina might have known this. But he cannot blame her for not quite trusting him when he hardly trusts himself. 

Chopping firewood and setting up the fire and the tent are rhythmic motions that do not do enough to keep his mind occupied, and still he thinks of the years that have passed since he saw the last of the Brood. Years of killing monsters tracked down through rumor, never being certain because of all the forms of dragons he had seen in the war... this one might be Ryu. The next one might be.

They never were. 

Leaving the Tower after Ryu vanished... that was hard. He’d suspected he was making a mistake during the War, but to know that he had, and might now have lost his only chance at understanding? Crushed as he had been in body and soul, he had barely managed to stand when the Princess and Momo came running in, and as for making himself understood... he suspected they might never forgive him for being unable to explain what had happened.

These are the memories he falls asleep to, and is it any wonder that his dreams are full of blood? The roars of the dragons and the screams of their children wouldn’t leave him when he still believed they were evil. Now they are an endless torture, and the worst nightmares are the ones where the Brood turn upon his own people the destruction they received. 

When he wakes this time, he at least has this solace: this time the monster he seeks is a dragon. Every question he has asked of the workers leaving this mine confirms it. Small though it is in their descriptions, it breathes fire, it has wings, and what’s more, it reminds some of the friends they lost years before. Of a dragon that they barely defeated, and captured, and then lost on the way to wherever they meant to send such a thing. 

There is evil in the world, that much is certain. But where, and possibly who, that evil is... he climbs, and wonders.

Garr was never the most righteous of the Tapa, is the problem. Oh, he said his prayers and thought he believed as devoutly as any of his people, but there was... also a sort of divide, between him and the others. Not a lack of belief, but a lack of intensity maybe. It was never something he spoke of to the others. But he knew it was there. 

And then he was made a Guardian, one of the supposed answers to his people’s prayers. Hmph.

He had always been more of a fighter than a priest, and learning the demands of his new position had not been the easiest thing. Speak softly, be ever so polite, the image of God’s will made manifest? He would honestly rather have been in a bar, though he could not be seen to frequent such a place after the change. An ordinary man might manage to pass unnoticed, at least often enough not to excite comment, but a seven-foot-tall being with wings and horns?

He’d never been sure he would have fit through the door of his favorite haunt, after that. Not exactly the most subtle form God could have given him, and that thought was a blasphemy he had felt ashamed of at the time. Now he can only feel bitter, and tired. Was it any wonder, when he first began wandering the world in search of ‘evil’, that he began to seek solace in such places again?

Oh, he had been honestly convinced there were still Brood in the world. How could he not be, when it had been so easy to defeat them? The suspicion that something more was going on had haunted him. Yes, he had the most kills out of any of the Guardians, but it wasn’t so great a difference that he thought himself a better warrior than the dragons he had faced. He had... been more enthusiastic, more energetic...

More angry, if he was honest with himself. And if he couldn’t be honest with himself, how could he expect Ryu to believe anything he said, once he found him? That they didn’t fight back had been terrifying, and the fear had been easy enough to turn to anger. Taking it out on the source of his fear had only been natural. Or what he had convinced himself at the time was the source, because there were some things that were too dangerous to think of on a battlefield. Gaist had been proof enough of that.

Now, with the years stretching between Garr and those fields... was it himself or his God that he feared most? 

So he wandered, looking for answers that he couldn’t admit he was looking for, and in the meantime he enjoyed himself quietly in every bar he came across. It was a bit disappointing to discover that he couldn’t actually get drunk, but that had never been why he went there. 

He’d gone for the fights. It was just easier, especially in Urkan Tapa, to excuse fights if you could blame them on beer. ‘Oh it wasn’t me, it was the evil spirits.’ Garr laughs softly, bitterly to himself at the thought. If he’d known there was a day coming when he wouldn’t need excuses to fight, would that have calmed him? Somehow he very much doubts it.

Was it any wonder he had ended up working with Balio and Sunder? It had been amusing, to think of the reactions of his people if they’d known. It had been lucrative, allowing him to continue his hunts between rounds of the Contest with no concern for earning money. And it had been fun, defeating opponents with ease that others seemed to think formidable. Even better than his old fights, and infinitely better than the War, with the cheering and the complete lack of a need to kill his opponents. He had settled into a comfortable routine there, and if he sometimes wondered at himself for not moving on and searching harder, well.

It hadn’t really mattered until the day Balio and Sunder had come into his favorite bar and the sense God had given him to react to the Brood had begun screaming. A child! A little, friendly, blue-haired boy not unlike those he had killed 400 years ago. Right there in front of him, in that dusty tavern in that forsaken backwater where he’d been beating down his sorrows. And his skin burned and his wings wanted to flex, and he knew he was going to be leaving the Contest. One way or another.

The trees sway and creak as he pushes his way clear of them and comes within sight of the Duana Mines. And his wings flex with no need to hide it, and his skin burns, and he can breathe for the first time in 10 years. “Finally, Ryu.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you like it! It isn't quite what you'd requested, I'm afraid, but it is what I started thinking about as soon as I saw your description of Garr. There is a distinct gap between what he's supposed to be, according to everyone else, and the kind of swaggering menace we actually meet in the Contest.


End file.
